Hollow Ghost / Rochelle Salt is the fourth full-length album by Finnish psych rock/pop/folk group Octopus Syng lead by singer/guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Jaire Pätäri who started the band as a solo project in 1999. As always, the making of this album has been quite a hard job including some major problems, but then again, you can seldom achieve anything great without hardships and sacrifices. At first, Jaire was planning to make two separate 10″ EP’s with different themes and styles, but it turned out the music worked better as a whole, after all. Well, at least it only took around two years to release a new album instead of seven like the last time! Jaire, who still writes all the songs, has been listening to a lot of chanson and musique concreté and deepening his obsessions with ancient microphones, Paris and old ghost stories. This time the influences go further back in time even to the 1920s and 1930s, but I’m sure people will still compare this to Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd… Which of course is still partly valid! You can still find melodic, sunny & catchy psych pop tunes on the album, but there are also more ghostly, eerie and experimental stuff in there.
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Hollow Ghost/Rochelle Salt takes many of the themes, sounds and textures that made their previous album so alluring and gives them a subtle twist. A rich, dark and sometimes mystical brew of modern psychedelic sounds, Hollow Ghost/Rochelle Salt is a sensitive and melancholic record that, like its predecessor, draws on the spirits of Syd Barrett and Jim Morrison for inspiration. It is, in parts, dissonant and eerie, and in others whimsical and diaphanous. It’s a luscious experience, a trippin’ musical creature, where each note is a short journey to unimaginable places in our minds.
So relax and let yourself drift into an ethereal world of dark imaginings and prepare yourself for a very strange trip!

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